When he was leader: Michael Ignatieff greets supporters at a Montreal fundraiser in 2009 Justin Trudeau. Trudeau was amongst the topics Ignatieff discussed in Ottawa Wednesday night. CP/Graham Hughes

Michael Ignatieff says Canadians should ask one question as the end of the Conservative government’s mandate approaches: What did the prime minister do for the country?

“We know what he will say, he will say, ‘I saved you from a depression.’ Fine and dandy,” Ignatieff told CTV’s Craig Oliver as the two sat in an Ottawa church Wednesday night, chatting like old friends.

“But if the question is, ‘Did you leave democracy in better or worse shape than you found it?’ I think the judgment of Canadians might be harsher.”

The former leader of the Liberal party was in town for the Ottawa International Writer’s Festival, to talk about his much ballyhooed memoir Fire and Ashes.

Ignatieff won’t deny that Harper is a formidable foe who’s changed the landscape of Canadian conservatism, and that the prime minister has tenacity, discipline, focus and ruthlessness – all things the former party leader says he admires.

But, Ignatieff said, Parliament’s been in steep decline since Harper took over – “its integrity, its capacity to act, its capacity to serve its citizens is weaker,” and this is something Canadians should be paying attention to.

“We tried to portray Harper as a right-wing Republican fanatic,” Ignatieff said of the last election campaign. “And it didn’t ring true to the Canadian people. What they saw was a pragmatic opportunist, which is what he is.”

“He shifts with the wind and the tides,” he told Oliver.

Ignatieff, who helmed the Liberals through a rapid decline that left the party in shambles after the 2011 federal election, said Fire and Ashes was an exercise in exorcizing demons.

Some have called the book insufferable or “eloquently whiny,” while others deemed it “charming… frank and funny.”

Wednesday evening, though, the insufferable and charming Ignatieff lamented what was and what wasn’t in his political career — the harsh “he’s just visiting” attack ads, Harper’s “ferocious hatred” of Liberals that is said to have cost Ignatieff personally and his regrets about failure in politics.

Beyond the personal, Ignatieff said he wrote Fire and Ashes for those folks crazy enough to want to get into politics and public service, so that they might have some idea of what they’re getting themselves into.

Politics does something to you, Ignatieff told the audience. It does something for losers, for sure, but even leading a political party will change who you are.

As a leader starts to speak more for others than for himself – which is much of what political leadership is about – and as he’s fitted with new suits and fitted up with microphones for interviews with the press, he starts to lose a bit of himself and perhaps some of that authenticity that led his party to choose him as a leader in the first place, Ignatieff said.

A bleak outlook for party leaders, it seems. But what of that guy who’s currently leading the Liberal party, Oliver wanted to know.

“Since December we’re all seeing something we thought we’d never see again, the Liberals on top in the polls,” the veteran CTV reporter, who knew Trudeau senior well, said.

“Mr. Harper has dropped down to his hard core of social conservative activists who hate everybody basically, except each other,” Oliver added, his words soon drowned out by laughter in the crowd and a quick “that’s a great line,” from Ignatieff.

“And I guess what I want to know is, can Justin Trudeau do it, in your view,” Oliver finished.

After skirting around the question a bit (“like the old days,” Oliver pointed out) Ignatieff made two points.

First, “a politician with numbers like mine is in no position to give advice to someone with numbers like his.”

And second, Trudeau has “a natural political gift. I’ve seen that in practice in the streets of Papineau.”

“There are all kinds of things that may happen between now and 2015, but he is his father’s son. And that cuts both ways. He’s inherited the political vocation from childhood, that’s not nothing. His sense of the country is very real, it’s not feigned.”

Ignatieff added, “But he also, I think knows, I certainly think he does, that he has to earn it. He really has to earn it. He can’t use the name to claim an entitlement, and if he does that he’s done.”

As the conversation drew to a close, Oliver had one last question.

Much of the Liberal party’s failure from 2011 has been placed on its former leader’s shoulders – the ineffective election campaign, the attack ads, his inability to respond to jabs from Jack Layton in a leader’s debate. This kind of failure would likely weigh heavily on anyone’s shoulders, regardless of their background or whether or not their father had failed to become governor general.

“What did this do to you, how much did this hurt?” Oliver asked. “You’re acting pretty cool about it all, but how much did it damage you, your reputation, the label of loser?”